A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

Tag: amicus briefs

For anyone who has watched The Wire, it’s no surprise that Maryland (Baltimore, in particular) has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the country. In an alleged effort to address this persistent problem, the state requires an applicant for a license to carry a handgun to demonstrate “a good and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.”

Under this prove-it-to-use-it standard, Baltimore County resident Raymond Woollard, who had had a license to carry for six years (after a violent home invasion), was denied a license renewal because he could not document that he had been threatened recently. The fact that he had been attacked by his son-in-law seven years earlier, an event to which it took law enforcement two-and-a-half hours to respond, was insufficient to meet Maryland’s special-need requirement.

Woollard, along with the Second Amendment Foundation, thus brought suit challenging the law under the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010). Although the district court ruled for Woollard, finding that Maryland’s restriction violated the Second Amendment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned the lower court and reinstated the law. The court purported to apply “intermediate scrutiny,” which allows a challenged statute to survive only if it is “substantially related to the achievement of an important governmental interest,” but in fact, hardly applied any scrutiny at all. The court’s analysis was both circular and contemptuous of Heller, finding that a regulation is “substantially related” to the valid government interest of curtailing criminal gun violence if it merely reduces the number of citizens lawfully carrying handguns, thus accepting the state’s implicit argument that the right to bear arms was itself the problem, one that should not be overcome without “a good and substantial” reason.

So says the subtitle of provocative new essay in The New Republic by my friend and sometime antagonist Simon “Si” Lazarus. Si’s argument boils down to the following:

Legal experts are puzzled. The “most conservative” Court issued major rulings this term supporting gay rights and declined to toss out the University of Texas’s racial preferences, among other iconoclastic opinions.

The public seems to think that the Court is either liberal or “middle of the road,” while the media line is that the Court is still “inching to the right.” What’s going on?

The Court may well be “inching right,” but the “right” isn’t made up solely of social conservatives or business types. There’s also libertarians!

It’s precisely this libertarian flavor of conservatism that’s now ascendant, as evidenced by, among other things, Cato’s success this year. [Cabin the issue of whether libertarians/Cato are part of the Right, the conservative movement, or anything else that better fits on a two-dimensional political spectrum.]

This rising libertarian influence isn’t all good news to progressives, despite our alliance over same-sex marriage. Remember, it’s they, even more than traditional conservatives, who are leading the charge to roll back the New Deal, Great Society, and everything else that’s good and holy in the modern progressive pantheon.

Even if conservatives and libertarians prevail in every single one of the cases [Lazarus] mentions, the federal government would still retain massive regulatory authority over almost every aspect of the economy and society. Obviously, it’s possible to characterize any decision to strike down or limit “regulatory legislation” on structural grounds as “junking the New Deal settlement.” But that’s like saying that any decision enforcing even modest constitutional limits on law enforcement amounts to junking the criminal justice system.

Still, we shouldn’t pooh-pooh libertarian achievements even if we recognize that libertarian legal nirvana isn’t just over the horizon. As Randy Barnett comments:

… the political mood of a significant segment of country does appear to be trending libertarian to some degree at the moment, due in part to the threat to constitutionally-limited government posed by the Obama administration that this segment now perceives — combined with a general war weariness that makes national security conservative dismissals of libertarian noninterventionism less politically effective. … Recent developments on such hot-button social issues as legalizing marijuana and recognizing gay marriage also show a more libertarian trend in the body politic at the moment. We all know these trends have always influenced [the Court] whether legal arguments made to the Court seem “off the wall” or “on the wall.”

So I take Lazurus’s essay to be another sign that libertarianism is trending up at the moment, perhaps more so than at any time in my lifetime. There is good reason for libertarians to worry that all this is “too little too late” in the face of the Obama administration’s success in expanding the welfare-administrative state in his first two years, and defending the gains over the past 2 years, combined with its embrace of the surveillance state that was expanded under the Bush administration.

But you can’t win, if you don’t play. And libertarians are now certainly in the game.

Yes we are. Though I don’t think, as the cheeky url of the Lazarus piece suggests, that it’s “supreme-court-libertarianism-ron-pauls-bench.”

Moreover, whatever’s going on behind the scenes at the Supreme Court, it’s not that “Alito Shrugged,” as the article’s title would have it. However much the Court becomes libertarian – as a whole, on average, in fits and starts – I don’t think that Justice Alito, let alone Justice Scalia, or Justice Ginsburg for that matter, is more libertarian than he was five or ten or twenty years ago.

From the Boston Tea Party of 1773 to today’s Tea Party movement, from suffragettes to Occupiers, freedom of political association has always been this country’s hallmark. Importantly, this First Amendment freedom extends to campaign contributions. As the Supreme Court affirmed in the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo,“the right of association is a basic constitutional freedom that is closely allied to freedom of speech and a right which, like free speech, lies at the foundation of a free society.”

The Buckley ruling has since survived many assaults—including, most notably, Citizens United v. FEC—though Citizens United exposed certain instabilities in Buckley’s framework. In any event, challenges continue to arise at the intersection of campaign finance law, political association rights, and the freedom of speech.

An important one comes from three individuals who have business contracts with the federal government. Under the Federal Election Campaign Act’s section 441c(a), “any person who is negotiating for, or performing under, a contract with the federal government is banned from making a contribution to a political party, committee, or candidate for federal officer.” Accordingly, the three plaintiffs are prohibited from making their intended campaign contributions and thus from an important form of political participation. This rule applies even to someone like name plaintiff Professor Wendy E. Wagner, who derives only a fraction of her income from the federal contract.

Together with the Center for Competitive Politics, Cato last week filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, arguing that the plaintiffs should be able to exercise their right to political association and speech by contributing to political campaigns. Specifically, we argue that section 441(c) is unique in that it entirely bans contributions by a class of individual citizens.

In McConnell v. FEC,the only case where the Supreme Court addressed an outright ban on contributions by a class of individuals—the ban on campaign contributions by minors originally in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform,” which McConnell otherwise substantially upheld—the Court struck it down as overly broad and because the government didn’t give sufficient justification. What’s clear from that ruling is that for a ban on political speech and association to be constitutional, the government must show that its targeted class of people is somehow too dangerous to be allowed to participate in the political process, and also that the ban applies only to that set of uniquely dangerous people. Section 441(c) doesn’t meet this test.

If the government wants to ban her from this important form of political participation, then it must give more than bare assertions of the specter of potential corruption.

The U.S. housing market has seen a major shift in the past 30 years: the rise of the community association. In 1970, only 1 percent of U.S. homes were community association members; today, more than half of new housing is subject to association membership, including condominium buildings. These organizations provide substantial benefits, including community facilities, maintenance, and rules designed to preserve property values, in exchange for assessment fees.

Accordingly, Mariner’s Cove Townhomes Association v. United States affects the rights of the more than 60 million Americans currently living in these associations. This case arises from the federal government’s taking 14 of 58 townhouses from one development in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Mariner’s Cove owned a right to collect dues that was appended to those 14 townhomes, and sued the government for extinguishing that valuable right without just compensation under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause.

In contrast to most lower courts, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that “the right to collect assessments, or real covenants generally” are not subject to Takings Clause analysis. In other words, the government can take those rights without paying anything to the owners. Cato and a group of esteemed professors, including Richard Epstein, James W. Ely Jr., and Ilya Somin, has submitted an amicus brief supporting Mariner’s Cove and arguing that the Supreme Court should take the case to clarify whether community association fees are compensable property under the Fifth Amendment.

Without such clarification, these beneficial private communities will be undercut. Such associations often shoulder the burden of providing and maintaining infrastructure, services, and utilities, which allows for more diverse and customizable amenities for homeowners than if those decisions were left with remote municipal governments. Because of these benefits, and because they increase the tax base, local governments are increasingly requiring developers to structure developments as community associations.

The perverse implications of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling are clear: it would allow for local governments to require he creation of a community association, benefit from the resulting private delivery of services while collecting taxes from its members, and later take the property without even paying back the very fees that enabled the government’s benefit. And the Fifth Circuit’s holding affects more than simply community associations. The court’s reference to “real covenants generally” implicates conservation easements, for example, which restrict the development and use of land for preserving the land’s natural, historic, or ecological features. This precedent would make association land an attractive option for uncompensated government takings.

The ruling also clashes with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Koontz v. St. John’s River Water Management District: that an income stream from real property is a compensable interest under the Fifth Amendment. For these reasons, we urge the Supreme Court to take the case and to recognize the compensable property rights of the Mariner’s Cove Townhomes Association and the millions of other Americans choosing—and paying—to live in a community association.

It’s unusual that the Supreme Court would choose to review an affirmative action case even though Fisher v. UT-Austinwas still pending. Ordinarily, when faced with a second case on the same legal issue, the justices “hold” it until they decide the first, then either send the second one back to the lower court to apply the newly announced rule or, perhaps, schedule it for oral argument on any additional issues that need to be addressed. Yet Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is no ordinary case.

Schuette asks whether a ban on racial preferences — or at least how that ban was enacted — violates the Equal Protection Clause, whereas Fisher asked whether their use does. In Schuette, 58% of Michigan voters approved Proposal 2 (a.k.a. the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative), a state constitutional amendment that prohibited racial preferences in public education, employment, or contracting. That ban was challenged by a coalition of groups and individuals who support the continued use of affirmative action, particularly at institutions of higher education.

A federal district court upheld the ban, but then a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck it down by a 2-1 vote. The full Sixth Circuit then agreed that Prop 2 was unconstitutional, in a contentious 8-7 ruling that produced five separate dissenting opinions. Now before the Supreme Court, Cato has joined the Pacific Legal Foundation and four other organizations on an amicus brief arguing that Michigan voters have acted constitutionally by prohibiting race- and sex-based discrimination or preferential treatment in public university admissions.

We contend that Prop 2 doesn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause under the Court’s “political structure” precedent, which outlaws subtle distortions of governmental processes in a way that places special burdens on the ability of minority groups to achieve beneficial legislation. The measures struck down in under that line of precedent differ marked from Prop 2 because, unlike in those older cases, minorities now have more protections against discrimination. Moreover, these protections apply across all levels of state government, not just discrete functions like housing and school busing.

Furthermore, Prop 2 creates no racial classifications so it cannot trigger “strict scrutiny” review. The simple fact that Prop 2 deals with race does not imply that it somehow disenfranchises racial minorities. If the Court finds that the “political structure” doctrine prohibits Prop 2, that precedent must be overruled as inconsistent with the text of the U.S. Constitution — though this is probably unnecessary given more modern precedent.

Interestingly, the California Civil Rights Initiative, known as Proposition 209, has been upheld repeatedly by the (notoriously left-wing) Ninth Circuit. Indeed, there is a wealth of evidence showing that minorities are succeeding under that system, which also prohibits the consideration of skin color in college admissions — and has led to higher attendance and graduation rates.

We urge the Supreme Court to side with Michigan’s voters and hold their ban on racial preferences (which the Court itself has admitted to be on shaky constitutional ground) to be constitutional.

Federal criminal defendants must fight a battle against the largest and most powerful organization in history, the U.S. government. At the very least, hopefully, they have a trusted attorney to fight with them.

That right of criminal defendants to choose their own lawyers is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment and ensures the integrity of the adversarial justice process. Yet prosecutors are increasingly using a procedure called “asset forfeiture”—which freezes assets suspected of being tied to crime—to deny defendants the funds they need to retain the lawyer of their choice.

In January 2005, Kerri Kaley, then a sales representative with a New York-based medical device company, was informed that she was the target of a grand jury investigation in Miami. She was suspected of stealing prescription medical devices from hospitals and selling them on the black market. Kerri and her husband Brian (also under investigation) hired counsel to represent them in what turned out to be a two-year investigation. During that period, their lawyers interviewed witnesses, reviewed countless documents, researched legal issues, and conferred with the prosecutors.

To pay their attorneys, the Kaleys took a home equity line of credit on their house and bought a certificate of deposit. In 2007, the grand jury returned indictments, accompanied by asset forfeiture orders restraining the Kaleys’ money. Because they had been indicted, the money was said to be criminally “tainted.” These asset-restraining orders were obtained without the Kaleys’ lawyers present (called an ex parte hearing).

The Kaleys challenged the freezing of their assets, arguing that, under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, they were entitled to a pretrial adversarial (not ex parte) hearing where they could contest the charges against them. They argued that their constitutional claim is particularly strong because the seized money was necessary to retain their chosen lawyers.

The lower courts disagreed, however, holding that the only adversarial hearing the Kaleys were entitled to was their trial—the same trial for which where they can’t afford the long-serving counsel of their choice. Now at the Supreme Court, the Kaleys hope to vindicate the right to retain counsel of choice. Indeed, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit is an outlier from the overwhelming majority of federal appellate courts, which use a more demanding test for such claims.

Supporting the Kaleys, Cato has filed a brief arguing that the stringent test developed in a 1976 case called Mathews v. Eldridge should be used to determine the scope of the Kaleys’ hearing. Under Mathews, where the government seeks to restrain contested assets that would otherwise be used to retain counsel of choice, an adversarial hearing is required in which defendants can challenge the indictment used to support forfeiture.

Because the expansion of forfeiture has given rise to well-documented abuses, the risk of error is great and the individual interests at stake are highly compelling. Ex parte hearings are insufficient to reduce the probability of error and the countervailing government interests are insufficient to tip the balance.

Ultimately, the right to counsel of choice preserves the integrity of the legal process by ensuring that the defendant, not the government, controls whom he trusts with his case.

The Supreme Court’s term is over, with 75 cases having been argued and decided. It’s safe to say that the most significant ones were those decided this week, on the politically fraught subjects of affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act and gay marriage. I’m extremely proud that Cato was on the winning side of each of these issues. In fact, we were the only organization to file briefs supporting the challengers on each one (Fisher v. UT-Austin, Shelby County v. Holder, Windsor v. United States & Perry v. Hollingsworth).

That says a lot. Not that the Supreme Court always takes its guidance from us – would that it were so! – but that we’re consistent in embracing the Constitution’s structural and rights-based protections for individual freedom and self-governance. It’s gratifying that the Supreme Court saw it our way in those “big” cases, even if Fisher was an extremely narrow decision and the others were all 5-4.

But that’s not all. After finishing my commentary on Windsor and Perry last night, I was curious to see how we did overall, beyond the high-profile cases. It turns out that we went 15-3 on the year. That is, looking purely at briefs we filed on the merits – you can see our record on briefs supporting cert petitions here – the Supreme Court ruled our way 15 times and against us three (and I can assure you that we don’t pick cases strategically to inflate our winning percentage. (I don’t count Perry in either column, by the way. While we ended up with a favorable result, Prop 8 struck down, the Court decided the case on standing grounds, incorrectly in my view).

Again, I’m not claiming that the Court was heavily influenced by briefs with Cato’s (or my) name on them – there’s just no way to know, and even briefs that are cited may be less influential than others – but many, many of these decisions track our thinking. That’s also gratifying, regardless of how the justices reached their conclusions.

For the record, here’s the list of cases in which we filed this term (in order of argument):

Losing side (3): City of Arlington v. FCC, Salinas v. Texas, United States v. Kebodeaux

My colleague Walter Olson has already compared our record to the greatest sports teams of all time, as well as what I consider to be the most dominate year by a baseball player, Sandy Koufax in 1963 (who went 25-5 and was the regular season and World Series MVP). I just wish that The Man With the Golden Arm could have had as long a career as Cato’s amicus brief program.